stevengharms.com

The League, he about to retire from this blogosphere, has rekindled in me memories of Verbot: Tomy’s miraculous robot for kids toy. Let me take you back to the Christmast of 1984 (or was it 1985?) on a not-at-all-snowy Christmas day in Houston, Texas.

Ah, Verbot, you cute little guy, with your hard plastic shell head, your friendly pseudo-Japanese visage, and your weird white microphone with a dangling black cable antenna… Thanks to incessant advertising during Transformers, everyone knew the sacred name of this proto-Cylon. Verbot was undoubtedly the toy of aspiration in my 4th grade Christmas year. I even recall in art class that the Y bechromosomèd were DRAWING verbot on those vast expanses of manilla paper. I think it would be fair to say that we had Verbot on the brain.

Having incredibly generous parents, come the dawn of the 25th of December, I had a Verbot.

Here’s how it would work.

1. Turn on Verbot
2. Hold in a chest button that corresponded to an action
3. Repeat the command you wanted to associate to the action
4. Hope that the solid red LED would light, indicating successful recording
5. More often than not it would take 3-4 repetitions to take
6. Now, attempt to repeat in proper voice, tone, and timbre the sounds that you associated to each command. A typical session would be:
7. Forward. Forward. No !@%!@!@$!@% I !@$!@%!@ said !@%$!@% you stupid !@%$!@%. Right. Forward. Forward. Pick Up. Pick-úp. Píck-up. Lift. Forward. Forward. NOTE: Cursing is optional, usually on the part of the parent wondering why the heck Santa brought this stupid !@$!@%!@% that doesn’t work.
8. Realize that 6 commands is not greatly entertaining after about 30 minutes.
9. Power Verbot down
10. Think of something cool you meant to do with Verbot, usually about 40 seconds after you slid his switch to OFF.
11. Loop.

I recall on Christmas Day eve, my father and I used Verbot to pick up a mini Pepperidge farm canister of parmesean cheese and move it across the dining table. That’s right, Verbot, petit garçon.

These were the good times.

My father seemed to have better luck with the Verbot because he understood what it was like to have an object of limited understanding, few interesting activities, and limitless capacity to ignore basic instructions: he had 2 kids already.

Speaking in level tones he seemed to be able to get Verbot to stack blocks, something like brain surgery with a cauliflower stalk. What can I say, anyone who grew up coaxing extra horses out of a GTO (think Luke Skywalker) in the canyons of Amarillo must have had a John Connor like grasp of machines.

But as all toys invariably go, at one point Verbot ended his playble life and was superseded by the next wave of kiddie conditioning.

I suspect that Verbot may have been the tipping point for many of us. Combining Verbot (effectively a Turtle) with an introduction to LOGO gave, I think, a generation its first taste of practical robotics. Just last month at Rubyconf there was a session on programming mini-controllers with Arduino.

I wonder how many of us first had our imagination kindled by these ‘bots.

Viva Verbot!

Month three of running. I’m running 10 laps (2.5 miles) in about 27 minutes. I’m weighing about 203 pounds. That’s 11 off from where I started.

Next week I’m attending RubyConf where I will run in the Rubyconf 5K &emdash; my first! I’m a bit anxious about being last, but on the other hand, I’m not going to be sleeping in late and bopping down to the raft o’ donuts unlike most, so I can feel good about whatever my time is.

1. Ibuprofen
2. Hydrocortizone creme
3. Baby powder
4. Ice

Buy / make it now, you’ll definitely need them later.

IMG_1897
Originally uploaded by sgharms

This is my new wallet.

I’ve long been a fan of the cigarette-case-as-wallet. It helps you cut down on your wallet footprint, and doesn’t encourage you to get bad posture when driving, seated, on a conventional wallet.

Each half holds 6 credit cards. Pictured is my Cisco ID and my Austin Swing Syndicate card. It has a really nice hematite metal exterior

If you’re interested, check out kyledesigns.com, this is case #10.

Exterior view

I was walking out of Raskin Bobbins this evening with a cup of ice cream and i noticed this woman having an epileptic fit to the Broadway score of Les Mis?rables…

…upon closer inspection the music turned out to be a church gospel chorus…

…and she was not having an epileptic fit, it was her bodily demonstration of the moving capabilities of the holy spirit…

I thought it would be cheap to pull out the cameraphone on that one.

I was driving this past Sunday from the Apple Store in PA back down to Mountain View and exited off of Alma / Central to head over to El Camino and the AT&T Store.

While at the intersection of Page Mill and El Camino I caught this red light and thought I would share the cameraphone pic of the fog coming over the Los Altos Hills.

Everyone thinks that the bay area is struck by fog in the winter - I admit, it’s poetic like that and Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” adds to this poetic vision. However, the fog comes in the summer, actually.

Well, it comes year round in many parts of SF, but the big thick billows - that’s summertime.

It’s damnable - days like this making you remember how lucky you are to live in a boring, expensive, sunny, perfect climate part of the world with the most powerful technology companies and the most liquid venture capitalists in the world.

I finally figured out how to use the Bluetooth Browser on the PowerBook to extract cameraphone pix from my Motorola V600. I should like to display picture number one.

The Molestermobile

Kids, if you see a van like this lurking about your school and the driver thereof is proffering you candy, you should turn and run the other way - find a teacher, preacher, police officer, whatever.

Time to change the layout. Be patient.

I stole a wallpaper from this site.

This gets me back in deciphering the Moveable Type template method.

…other links will be added back in later….

I hate PowerPoint. It’s nefarious effects are now working its tentacles into the romantic world: link

The Accordion Guy’s blog is pretty good, I may add him to my side panels — I certainly have much pathos for him after this story.

For those of us with an art versus practical side, gapingvoid.com offers these ten insights about being creative.

Remember how when you were a kid you had a favorite everything: color, food, pet, friend?

I don’t have a whole lot of favorites these days - but I do have a favorite wild animal:

Elephants!

I love elephants! They are so interesting, smart, capable, and have a very complex social structure (this may be a warning against watching too much Animal Planet).

They’re also great terraformers! The indigenous flora of Africa often has less-than optimal effects on the fauna in the area. What’s the natural solution? Knock crap over!

These four-legged bulldozers take out and redecorate as they see fit and at a rate that would rival 3 house/room/swap/clean reality shows on the learning channel.

OK, and now to up the mush factor, baby elephants are the funniest and most playful creatures. You get so used to an elephant being a slow and lumbering savannah-yachts — but I saw this baby elephant chasing one of those birds that usually ride on the adults. He was lashing his trunk in an attempt to swat it while running. It was hilarious.

Baby elephants can’t really control their trunks as precisely as adults and they tend to flop them around in circles. It cracks me up.

I cannot watch an elephant and stay in a bad mood.

They also use extremely sub-sonic noises to communicate across the savannah. For years biologists thought that it was some sort of radar, or ESP, or something, or something else. Instead of attributing amazing advances to mysterious phenomena, like our president, we know today it is just science. Imagine that.

In any case, elephants, their unfortunate association with Republicans aside, are amazing creatures.

I also like octopods too. But they’re not cute, they’re just amazing.